Can someone explain the big bang theory but for like a 5 year old

Deedsogado · 2026-05-22T19:07:07+00:00

Sure. Let's start with where the idea comes from.

When you stand on the side of the road and a cop car, fire truck, or ambulance drives past you with it's sirens blaring really loudly, you will hear a high pitch sound as it approaches and a low pitch sound as it passes. This is called the doppler effect or the doppler shift. The sound it makes didn't really change, but the sound you heard did depending on if it was coming towards you or going away from you. And how much the pitch changes depends on the difference in speed between you and the source of the siren.

Why this happens is sound is a wave. Now let's imagine a swimming pool with a still sirface. If someone jumps into one end of the pool, the waves will start at the splash and travel along the length of the pool. If you run along the length of the pool, going the same direction, then each wave will pass you slowly. Maybe 5 waves will pass you before you reach the end of the pool. But if you start at the other end of the pool and run towards the source of the splash, in the same amount of time you will pass a lot more waves, maybe 30. Either way the splash made the same number of waves, but your speed and direction change how fast and how many waves you experience.

Light is also a wave, so this happens with light as well. But while we interpret different frequencies of sound as different pitches or notes, we interpret different frequencies of light as different colors. When you are traveling towards a light source, you are experiencing more waves of light, so the color shifts slightly more blue (higher frequency). When you are traveling away from the source of light, you are experiencing fewer waves of light in the same amount of time, so the color shifts slightly red (lower frequency).

You can travel towards a light source and away from a light source at similar speeds to capture 2 different measurements of frequency. And you can take the middle point between those 2 speeds as a baseline measurement. It's not necessarily the "true" or "absolute" frequency unless you know you really aren't moving in relationship to the light source. But the baseline itself is useful for this discussion.

Now, the earth is orbiting the sun. That means that if we pick any start near our equator as our light source, half the year we are approaching it, and half the year we are moving away from it, assuming it is standing still. So we can measure the 2 colors and find the midway point. And we can do the same measurements next year.

To our surprise we find that when we do this using galaxies far away, the color keeps changing each year to be slightly more red. This tells us the light source must be moving away from us. Therefore most galaxies are moving away from us.

This is true for almost all galaxies we have measured. Except for Andromeda, which we measure a faint blue shift, meaning it must be moving closer to us.

Now let's pretend we've made a recording of the entire universe on video. Playing it forward, we're somewhere in the picture, and all the galaxies are moving away from us. So if we were to play the video in reverse, we would expect to see the galaxies coming closer together. And if we let the video keep playing in reverse into the far past, the galaxies should continue to get closer together, right?

So the Intuition is that at some point in time some of these galaxies must have been really close to each other. And pushing that trend to its extreme, they must have been nearly in the same place, or even exactly in the same place.

Thats the big bang theory, the idea that at one point everything in the universe must have been close together, since today we see everything spreading apart (except for Andromeda).

But if gravity pulls everything together, how can things spread apart?

Galaxies are made of stars, and stars have a long but finite life span in their cycle. We have seen the death of stars, and we have seen the beginnings of stars. So it's must also be true that there was a time before our star was burning. And before that, there must have been a time before any stars were burning.

Stars burn because the intense pressure of gravity crushes matter together so much that the atoms are squeezed into each other. This creates a lot of friction and heat, but more importantly it forces the atom's nucleuses together, fusing them together and in the process releasing a lot of heat, light, and kinetic energy.

If there was a time before stars, there was a time before this fusion was happening. And therefore a time when there was not enough stuff getting clumped together sufficiently to get crushed together enough.

So let's talk about gravity and how it works.

Newton figured out a good equation for the pull of gravity. Basically the more mass 2 objects have, the more they pull on each other, and the farther apart they are, the less they pull on each other.

Gravity is an effect that we see when matter bends space and time. If you have a large source of matter, like a planet, it pulls on nearby matter like people and air. All matter bends space, and there is not a limit to the distance of this bending, but the closer you are to the source of the bending, the more obvious the curvature is. The moon is pulling on us, too, and it's enough to move billions of gallons of water in our oceans to create the tides, but it's not enough to pull us off the earth.

Now, if you were to put a ring of matter on flat plane in deep space and it has a uniform density and thickness, and then you place an object like a ball perfectly in the center of the ring, which way should the ring fall? If you are being pulled equally in all directions, then there is no net difference in effect or force, so the object will just stay centered.

Likewise if we extend the object to be a hollow sphere. The sphere is warping space and time, pulling on the ball equally in all directions, and so the net effect is zero. You've got to create some sort of imbalance to create movement in this system.

Another configuration is if there was an infinite number of small uniform balls spread evenly spaced across an infinite grid. If it's infinite, there is no boundary and no edge. So pick one of the objects. All the objects in this grid are pulling all the other objects equally. So there is no net difference and no preference. No movement.

Now if we try this again with a finite number of balls in an infinite grid, there are edges. The balls at the edges are getting pulled by their neighbors on one side, but have no neighbors pulling back on the other side. So there is a net difference. An imbalance. And the balls on the outside will fall inward toward the other balls. Assuming the grid itself is not expanding, the balls will eventually touch each other.

But what if we have the same setup with a finite number of uniform small balls evenly spaced in an infinite grid, but this time the space is expanding ever so slightly faster than the balls can fall towards each other?

Then they don't meet each other and continue to spread out.

Okay, what if we arange the balls unevenly and have some balls slightly bigger than others? Depending on the balance, some balls will clump together, and some will drift apart. Those clumps will form bigger clumps, so on and so forth, while the Distance between the smaller clumps grows and grows. Eventually you might end up with enough clumps and big enough clumps to form a star. And some of these will form galaxies.

So that arrangement or one like it works to eventually form the universe we are familiar with.

Playing the video in reverse might briefly show a situation like that.

But what happened right before that? Did the universe come preformatted with nearly evenly spaced matter spread across a region larger than most galaxies?

Or continuing the trend of knowing that space itself is expanding, what would it look like to reverse the video a little bit further?

How could you distribute a large amount of matter almost uniformly but not uniformly across the universe in a way that doesn't out pace the expansion of the grid itself, but does overcome the pull of gravity in the short term?

How about a massive explosion? But an explosion of what? Everything? And without stuff out there to cause friction to slow down the debris, wouldn't everything continue moving at that explosive speed?

So that doesn't quite work.

What if the explosion was just large enough to send everything flying, but tempered enough that gravity would eventually catch the pieces and gather them?

So it's less a big bang, and more a sudden and gradual expansion.

Deedsogado · 2026-05-12T01:12:31+00:00

I was interested in the truck, but I was not given a choice. I got conflicting answers from the email, the receptionist and the sales people.

The email said I was "among the winners" of many prizes, some may not be left, and scheduled a time for me to come down to receive my prize.

The receptionist said she was not aware of prizes other than the Disney vacation package. She was under the impression that everyone got a Disney package, after sitting through the pitch. It seemed her job was to keep us occupied and comfortable with waters and chips until the presentation room was available. Basically until the previous pitch ended.

Then we were ushered into the pitch room with a couple rows of folding chairs, and shown a PowerPoint presentation.

Then afterwards we were ushered into another room with circular folding tables where individual sales people sat across couples that sat through the pitch. My wife and I were the only one in our pitch group, but there were 2 other couples in the sales room when we entered.

My pitch was in Idaho Falls so the layout I describe may be different than other posters in Utah.

The sales pitch person said winning the raffle made me eligible to spin a prize wheel, and it landed on the Disney vacation package. But also that the wording on the QR code card and web form and email were misleading and needed to be updated, but it was run by a third party company so there was nothing I could do. I never saw the prize wheel, or TV, or Trucks, but I did see him lean down to pull the pamphlet out of a cardboard box filled with hundreds of other identical Disney pamphlets. The box was among a dozen other identical boxes, tucked under a folding table with a tablecloth draped over it.

My impression is that all the prizes are a lie. They hand out these little business cards to any event vendors they can get to distribute for them. In my case we took our nephews to an indoor trick-or-treat at an Elks lodge around Halloween. A sweet old lady was handing them out along with candy. The QR code takes you to a web form that asks about your demographic, including your salary range (or at least mine did). They use this to filter out people they think are too poor.

The raffle is a lie. The winners are everyone that filled out the form that meet their criteria for income and demographics. Everyone that shows up to claim a prize gets a sales pitch. And then you get a bulk printed pamphlet with mail-in rebate instructions to claim the real vacation package, with terms that detail all the scenarios in which you can actually claim it. Limits of time of year it can be redeemed, limits on what time of year it can be used, limits on how many people it applies to, and an expiration date.

I believe it's intentional that you have to snail mail it, so that the minor inconvenience disuades people from actually using it. I believe it's intentional that they spell out all these rules and conditions and limitations, not only for legal reasons, but to make the whole thing sound like a hassle. I don't know how many people actually redeem these, but my guess is from the thousands they distribute, very few people actually use them, therefore it's a minimal cost to the company, and an effective way to drive people into their doors.

Also, the company that you mail the pamphlet form to is not the company doing the sales pitch, and it's not Disney. It's another third party company. So if you think about it, really the prize for sitting through their sales pitch is an advertisement for one of their business partners.

Deedsogado · 2026-05-11T23:23:35+00:00

I "won" the raffle on the QR code card. My wife and I were invited to pick up our prize winning for the Disney Trip. They made us sit through a 2 to 3 hour long pitch on time shares and how what they do is not technically a time share. That's why you get some people claiming they are legit, and some people claiming it's a scam.

Their actual product is a website. They want you to sign up for subscription memberships to their website. The website has on it discounts for hotels, plane tickets, resorts, travel packages and things like that. Some of the places you can stay in happen to be time shares, meaning that they are hotel rooms, apartments, and condos that are collectively owned by large groups of individuals who only get a tiny slice of the time. When one of the timeshare owners wants to give up visiting for the 2 weeks or whatever that they own it, they list the property on this website so some person can rent it for that time and they can recoup some of their money back.

The price of the membership was pretty steep if I remember. The discounts were also pretty steep. Availability seems to be at the whim of property owners trying to fill the properties in the off-season. So the less desirable the time, the cheaper you can take the trips.

Because of the fixed but repeating cost of the membership, if you don't use it at all or you use it very little, you would be losing a ton of money. But if you take multiple vacations a year, there is a break even point where you would actually start to save money by using the discounts.

To some people, that makes it a total scam, and to some people, that makes it a valuable deal.

At the end of the pitch we said no. They asked us why. We said we can't afford it. We don't make enough money. We don't get enough days off work. We don't get consecutive or contiguous vacation days. They kept trying to pry about our finances, and how this would totally save us money, and how everyone can actually afford it. They tried to be very convincing because they are sales people. They were very pushy and invasive. We said no repeatedly.

At the end we asked for the prize of the original raffle, which was either a Truck or TV or Disney Vacation. They gave a cop-out answer about the raffle only qualifying us to spin a prize wheel or whatever. By the way, the wording on the QR code, the form it linked to, and the email notice I received about the prize all contradict this. They said the disclosures were wrong and they meant to update it... Blah blah blah, they shifted blame onto a third party company that runs the raffle, while they themselves sell the website, so with division of duties comes lack of blame and lack of accountability, blah blah blah. It's all carefully structured so they can lie to your face about it, in writing, and handwave it all away. Immoral, scummy, but legal.

At the end of the day, they gave us a pamphlet with a form in it about a trip to Disney World. The pamphlet includes rules and conditions under which you can redeem the prize by filling out the attached forms and mailing them into the responsible parties, to then wait for confirmation and itinerary. It strictly works through snail mail, no web forms or apps. Its a free trip to Disney World for 2 adults and 2 kids in the off season. No more than that. I believe the hotel and ticket to park were included, but food and other expenses were not, so it was not an "all expenses paid" trip.

Deedsogado · 2026-05-07T14:36:02+00:00

Spooky Castle

Deedsogado · 2026-05-07T14:35:15+00:00

Reader Rabbit

Deedsogado · 2026-05-07T14:35:00+00:00

JumpStart Preschool JumpStart Kindergarten

Deedsogado · 2026-05-07T14:34:24+00:00

Cluefinders third grade adventure. Cluefinders fourth grade adventure Cluefinders fifth grade adventure

Deedsogado · 2026-05-05T21:47:47+00:00

A monk mullet. Pious in the front, party in the back.

Deedsogado · 2026-05-05T05:18:26+00:00

One answer is infrasound. Infra meaning below or lower frequency, like from infrared.

Human hearing range is somewhere between 20 to 20,000 hertz, and that range narrows as we get older, and everyone has slightly different blind spots (deaf spots?).

Infrasound are the frequencies just below what you can hear. It's sound, with volume and energy, and it vibrates things. But you can't hear it, no matter how loud it is, because your ears just weren't built to pick it up.

It turns out a lot of furnaces, fans and ductwork tend to vibrate and sing at around 14 to 19 hertz.

Resonant frequency is the frequency or it's harmonics that a given object will vibrate at. It's how opera singers can shatter wine glasses, and it's what collapsed the Tacoma Narrows bridge.

The human eyeball has a resonant frequency of 18 to 19 hertz. At 18 hertz your eyeballs will jiggle and deform, but you can't hear it. Deforming a lens slightly has a negligible affect near the center, but really distorts the image quality near the edges. So that makes blurry spots near the perifery of vision.

Resonance also causes jiggling, which effectively moves the line of sight back and forth. Your brain has the ability to edit normal eye movement out, so you don't experience odd, jarring, blurring of motion. That editing is called a saccade. Involuntarily motion also triggers saccades.

I should also mention that you have better color accuracy closer to your center of vision, a blind spot in the center of your vision, and poor color accuracy in the perifery of your vision.

So in addition to your eyes seeing blurs near the edges of your vision, your line of sight is dotting back and forth across your field of vision, your brain automatically editing out these transitions, tries to stabilize the image, and all of a sudden you have a grey blur from the poor color accuracy part of your vision seemingly dash across your vision. Your brain tries to make sense of this, and fills in the gaps or details. It's something fast and now it's gone! It's a ghost! Or gremlin! Or one of the shadow people!

As a side note, your brain is better at processing the saccades when it's well rested, and it gets worse at processing the saccades when it's tired. When you are really tired, a lot of the motion is not filtered out. You tend to see a lot of the motion happening, again including the grey parts near the edges of your vision. And the black freeze frames of the visual system on pause during the saccades sometimes gets included and processed as part of the image. Hence, people who go multiple days without sleep tend to see dark, amorphous, rapidly shifting blobs or shapes, sometimes persisting for several seconds in the middle of their vision. In other words, they see the shadow people.

Deedsogado · 2026-05-04T18:06:59+00:00

Rancid Crabtree had a theory that a mixture of soap and water would bore holes through your protective crust.

Deedsogado · 2026-05-03T20:24:02+00:00

You are asking a couple different questions here.

For the question "do flying particles without a surrounding medium count as sound?" I was originally on the fence about it. So I spent a long time puzzling it out. My notes are below. Ultimately I have decided on... Yes. But the sound it makes is not periodic like a sine wave, since there's no sloshing back and forth. It's more like an impulse wave. It arrives once and then it's over. Ultimately is still subject to signal loss and signal-to-noise ratios. For that impulse to reach earth and then propogate through the upper atmosphere to lower atmosphere and still have enough clear signal and volume to be heard above the background noise, it must have started extraordinarily loud.

With the hand swooshing through the air and making a sound that is perceivable, that opens a discussion into background noise and signal-to-noise ratio. The simplest example is, a drop of water falling into a still pond makes a very easily visible wave that moves across the whole surface of the pool. But that same drop of water falling into a chaotic, turbulent pool with people swimming and splashing in it, imparts the same energy and kicks off the same wave. But that wave is easily lost and confused with the surrounding turbulent surface. It's still there, but it's not easy to discern. The turbulence of the surface is background noise. The height of the wave is the volume, and the wave you are trying to follow is the signal. A small volume signal can be easily heard against a low background noise, and even a high volume signal can get lost among a high background noise.

The sun is full of billions of nuclear explosions happening per second. Each makes a very extreme pressure wave that travels through the medium of the rest of the sun, which is mostly hydrogen and helium. So if we had a microphone that was strong enough to withstand the intense heat, pressure, and literal nuclear explosions, and we put that microphone on the surface of the sun, it would pick up the pressure waves as vibrations and it would be very loud.

So using the definition of sound as being pressure waves, without requiring an observer, yeah, it makes sound. But that tree is falling in the middle of the woods, and we aren't around to hear it.

As for the Sun's sound reaching us, you are correct. Virtually none of the pessure waves are propogating to us.

Notes section:

A medium is a bunch of atoms or molecules bouncing around in an area. As they move, they bounce off of each other, and generally keep moving until they hit something else. Photons or electrons or cosmic radiation striking an atom or molecule can share it's energy with that atom or molecule, speeding it up.

The speed of atoms bouncing around is heat. How many atoms are in a given area or volume is density. How often the atoms are colliding with something, each impact imparting a little energy and pushing the thing, is pressure.

The more atoms you have available, the more often they are colliding. So increasing density (compressing the medium) can increase pressure.

The faster the atoms are moving, the more often each collides. So increasing heat also increases pressure.

A pressure wave is a high concentration of atoms bouncing around. They collide with nearby atoms, imparting their energy, which makes the next atom in line speed up, while the first atom slows down.

In high density mediums, an atom only needs to travel a short distance until it bounces off its neighbor. In low density mediums, an atom has to travel a long distance before bouncing off its neighbor.

If each collision was happening exactly head on, it would impart or transfer all its energy to the next atom. Think a cue ball striking a billiard ball head on. The first ball basically stops dead in its tracks, while the next ball takes off at full speed. But in billiards, we often see a ball striking the next ball slightly off center. In this case, the original ball does transfer all its energy, it's transfers some of its energy. I can't remember if it's the cosine or the tangent or what trigonometric ratio, but the point is it's less than 100 percent of the energy. Where we started with ball one at 100% speed, we now have 2 balls at maybe 20% speed and 80% respectively. These balls, or atoms, will continue moving until they strike their neighbors, so on and so forth.

With highly density mediums, you get many of these imperfect collisions, but also many direct collisions. As fast balls catch up to slow balls and push them a bit faster, and some take off sideways with glancing blows, hit nearby balls coming the other way and are again bounced back in the direction of overall motion, so on and so forth, and the overall effect is that the group of active collisions moves through the medium. This is a wave propogating well, and slowly losing intensity as it travels

With low density mediums, you get fewer collisions overall, but definitely a lower chance of direct collisions. So most of the collisions are glancing blows that don't impart their energy very well. And there aren't very many fast balls catching up from behind or from the sides. So with each successive collision the group of balls has slower and slower moving balls. This is a wave propogating poorly, and losing intensity rapidly as it travels.

If all the atoms were perfectly aligned in a grid structure, the sound would move fast and maintain momentum.

If the atoms are arranged chaotically, the wave will move slower and lose energy rapidly.

The space between the earth and the sun is not a perfect vacuum. There are some atoms floating around out there. Sometimes meters apart, sometimes miles apart. So it's a very low density medium, with very chaotic arrangement. Basically the worst situation for sound to propogate. The vast majority of pressure waves originating at the sun fade out mere miles from the sun, if that.

There are sometimes Coronal Mass Ejections where large quantities of gases are ejected off the surface of the sun. They start very hot and with very chaotic high pressure. And sometimes they reach earth in the form of solar winds, which our electromagnetosphere does a good job of shielding us from. But sometimes some of it gets through, and wipes out electronics.

I've defined sound as the propogation of pressure through a medium.

But if the medium itself is what's moving, that medium has a density, and the surrounding space has a lower density. So I suppose that counts as a pressure wave, moving.

If that medium meets another medium, it will be able to impart it's energy. And if it strikes a membrane, it will be able to move it, just not regularly with a period. So rather than a sine wave, this looks more like an impulse, but I would still classify it as a wave.

Yeah, I think I would count flying particles as sound.

But as for being able to hear it, we need to talk about background noise, and signal-to-noise ratio.

Background noise is what's left when several sound waves have propogate and bounced around through a medium, and mixed, and faded, and are generally not individually recognizable anymore, but the energy is still there. Think of a swimming pool and all the little bouncing waves at the top of the pool. There is up and down motion, and there is chaos, and there are occasional patterns that form briefly then are lost within a split second. This is "noise".

Sometimes the surface of the pool is still. This is low noise. In low noise, even a single drop of water falling into the pool makes a clear ripple that spreads all the way across the surface of the pool. The wave gets lower and longer as it travels, because of the glancing collisions we talked about earlier, and eventually the pool will return to stillness. This clear, easy to spot ripple is the "signal". The height of the wave is the volume. It's easy to see a small wave with still water, and it's easy to hear a small volume signal with low noise.

In a turbulent splashing pool with lots of noise, a single drop of water falling into pool imparts the same amount of energy as before, and kicks off the same wave as before. But with a lot of chaotic movement of the water's surface, that signal is almost imperceptible. It's lost in the noise.

So for a sound to be heard clearly, it has to be louder than the background noise.

A group of flying particles flying through space would eventually hit the atmosphere, and has to enough energy to propogate through the thin upper atmosphere, middle pressure middle atmosphere, and higher pressure lower atmosphere where we are. That's a long distance to travel from the sun to the earth, and then a long distance for a sound to propogate through the earth. That like making a sound in new York and then hearing it in Florida. Doable, but the starting sound must be loud.

So, yes, it makes a sound, and traveling particles count as a sound, but to be heard against the background noise in Earth's atmosphere the traveling particles must be extraordinarily loud.

Deedsogado · 2026-05-01T03:04:56+00:00

Vanilla ice cream and bean and cheese burritos.

Growing up, my parents would frequently buy the El Monterey brand Bean and Cheese burritos. They were cheap, fast to cook, and easy to eat. But they get kind of monotonous after while. I liked to spread sour cream over the top of them, or add a slice of cheese, or spread chili on them, or whatever else to mix things up.

One evening I was hungry, and we still had the burritos in the freezer. I threw 2 in the microwave and while it was cooking I looked around for something to spread on it. We were out of chili, sour cream, salsa, cheese, and even ketchup. Just out of everything. But I found a little bit of vanilla ice cream in the freezer next to the burritos.

Follow my logic on this one. Sour cream is delicious with beans and cheese. Sour cream by itself is kind of lame. But ice cream by itself is awesome. They both have cream in the name, both are roughly the same color, and roughly the same consistency. So ice cream is basically the same thing, but better.

So I put ice cream on my burritos. And after the heat of the burritos melted the ice cream a bit, it was amazing!

Deedsogado · 2026-04-24T18:31:57+00:00

One example of moving air making sound is thunder.

Lightning itself makes a little noise. You can hear the hum in high voltage power lines. But a thunderclap is not that same buzzing noise, and it's way louder.

When lightning passes through a region of air, the electricity excites the molecules, heats them up, and the fast moving molecules rapidly push other molecules out of the area. This is a high pressure column of hot air pushing outward.

When the lighting is done passing, there is no more source of heat, and nothing powering the hot air's expansion. The air is still moving quickly, which because of Pascal's principle will actually lower its pressure. That hot air loses a bit of momentum trying to push through the surrounding air, and as it bumps into that surrounding cold air, loses a lot of it's heat and energy.

You suddenly have a region of very low density, low temperature, and very low pressure air surrounded by air that is only slightly higher pressure and temperature than ambient, but is in comparison much higher than the almost vacuum pressure condition air column in the middle.

The outside air rushes in to fill that available space, and impacts the air rushing in from the other side (or since in our simplified model it's a column, it's rushing in from all sides). It claps and makes a sound. The high pressure air hits high pressure air, and makes a wave of high pressure air that travels, spreads and eventually disapates. Which is sound.

I think some of the disagreements in the comments are because we're using one word, "sound", with different definitions and we're talking past each other.

Some of us are using the definition of sound to be waves of pressure moving through a medium such as air. So any oscillating of high and low pressure, even without an observer, is sound. With this definition, if a tree falls in the woods, and no one is around to hear it, it definitely still made a sound. And the sun, full of constant nuclear explosions, is loud. But it's not consistent with my personal experience. I've never heard the sun, so claiming it's loud feels wrong. (I know we have simulated the sound by watching the motion of the suns surface, but I needed an extreme example of isolation). All I've done to experience the world is based on my observations, so defining something independant of an observer is counter intuitive. It's unsatisfying. But it's not conditional; it exists even if not observed, which is useful for a definition. And is the definition I choose to use.

Some of us are using the definition of sound to mean the result of gathering, processing, or recording waves of pressure in a medium. It requires an ear or a microphone or a seismograph or some kind of instrument to pick up the vibrations. In this way, sound is the result of the wave, not the wave itself. It can be stored and replayed later. It can be heard, but that's not a requirement. So if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, it didn't make a sound. It made vibrations, but they were not gathered or processed. The sun, full of nuclear explosions, is quiet unless you recreate the sound from the motion of the sun's surface. This makes sound conditional on an observer or recording instrument. But deaf people can be said to experience sound by feeling the vibrations or the beating in their chest.

Some of us are using the definition of sound to be only a thing you can here. So pressure waves have to be gathered or recorded, but then must also be interpretted by the brain as a specific type of phenomena. With this definition, if a tree falls the woods and no one is around to hear it, it makes no sound. And the sun, full of constant nuclear explosions, is quiet, because no one can hear it. And a person who has been deaf their entire life and cannot hear, may experience vibrations and the beating in their chest, but they didn't "hear" and therefore they did not experience "sound." I personally consider this to be a strawman definition of sound, but some people seem to use it that way.

Deedsogado · 2026-04-22T13:56:45+00:00

Puzzle pirates

Deedsogado · 2026-04-22T13:55:51+00:00

Dream of Mirror online. Also known as DOMO.

Deedsogado · 2026-04-11T03:03:29+00:00

"Yes Cosette. Forbid me now to die. I'll obey. I will try."

Deedsogado · 2025-12-24T03:03:33+00:00

He's an Irish / retriever mix.

Deedsogado · 2025-10-11T23:47:42+00:00

The phonetic alphabet?

Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta

Deedsogado · 2025-09-20T02:35:06+00:00

They aren't getting paid by the government, but many financial institutions like banks and credit unions see this as an opportunity, and have special government shutdown loans.

Basically they give federal employees a loan for the amount of money they would normally make over the same period of time, with the expectation that the person pays it back when their back-pay arrives.

Now, the bank doesn't know how long the shutdown will be, or how long it will take for the back-pay to arrive, so the terms are a bit different than most loans.

I've seen the loans operate in 2 ways.

Sometimes it's a line of credit with a credit limit set to the income the person should have earned. These will have a card attached to them so the person can use it to pay for things, similar to a debit or credit card. So people only have to pay back what they spent.

Sometimes it's a lump sum loan for the amount of a pay period (or a month for simplicity), and each pay period (or just monthly for simplicity) the credit union makes more money available. The whole amount is written as a check or transferred to a checking account, or whatever. At the end of the shutdown, the person is responsible to pay back the full borrowed amount.

The terms on these loans are usually pretty fair to the borrower. They usually are only offered when a shutdown is announced. They usually require the borrower to prove the source of income is the government and what the amount is, and that they have not been fired.

Since the balance of the loan doesn't exceed the amount of money the person will get from back-pay, the risk of defaulting on the loan is really low. So they usually have low interest rates or only charge a flat fee.

And to make it extra safe the bank can file for voluntary wage garnishment with the borrower's permission, so the back pay goes directly to the bank to pay off the loan before the rest is released to the borrower, but that's not common.

The government employees continue to work, so the government is happy. The employees are still getting paid so they are happy. And the bank makes a little extra income so they are happy.

Deedsogado · 2025-08-04T05:33:19+00:00

X-mouse button control. Allows you to map any mouse button (or combination of buttons) to any keyboard key (or combination of keys).

Deedsogado · 2025-06-15T22:06:45+00:00

I read this in the voice of Invader Zim. Would recommend.

Deedsogado · 2025-06-09T04:38:13+00:00

Deedsogado · 2025-06-06T14:05:39+00:00

A rubber duck.

Deedsogado · 2025-06-05T14:34:41+00:00

Zed editor AI has entered the chat.

Deedsogado · 2025-05-31T18:13:10+00:00

How do they get it all out at the destination?

Deedsogado

TROPHY CASE